He planned to pursue the project commercially, but his father, who had come of age in “Boardwalk Empire”-era Atlantic City, forbade it: elevator music, he said, was controlled by the mob, and no son of his was going to come within spitting distance.

Elevator music... and the mob. It's all so evil! Then Woodland, as a grad student, heard about the need to encode product data efficiently. He dropped out of grad school, "holed up at his grandparents’ home in Miami Beach," and "spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking." He thought about Morse code, which he'd learned in the Boy Scouts.

“What I’m going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale,” Mr. Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. “I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason — I didn’t know — I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. I said: ‘Golly! Now I have four lines, and they could be wide lines and narrow lines instead of dots and dashes.’ ”

21 comments:

Back when, the owner of the firm I was working for installed Muzak in our offices while I was gone.When I got back, I stood it until about 10 o'clock, but then got a stepladder and a pair of pliers and cut the wires to the two speakers nearest my space.

Here's some random info about bar codes via the internet. If you look at the first three numbers below the bars, you can figure out where the item was made.For example:00 - 09 USA or CANADA30 - 37 FRANCE40 - 44 GERMANY49 JAPAN50 UK 471 TAIWAN690-692 CHINA

And supermarket music I believ has been created to give young people with absolutely no talent for music an opportunity to make money for college tuition. It is intended to make dazed and numb so that you will just grab items at random off the shelves.Always make up a shopping list at home and do not deviate fom it!

I recall as a youth being in a grocery store on 1950s Long Island and observing the bar codes on products being discussed at a register. It was probably two decades before establishments had the capability of reading them, but someone had the foresight to begin imprinting them, whether it was Woodland's version or not.